COLLATERAL FREEDOM
RSF unblocks 26 censored websites in 14 countries.
How does RSF outsmart censorship?
Operation #CollateralFreedom circumvents Internet censorship by means of a strategy in which “mirrors” or duplicates of the censored websites are created on international servers belonging to the world’s Internet giants. If a country wants to block access to the mirrors, it must also deprive itself of access to all the sites and services hosted on these servers, which would inflict significant “collateral damage” on its own economy.
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#CollateralFreedom
Help us to outsmart censorship!
RSF has to buy bandwidth to keep its mirror sites accessible. The more they are visited, the faster this bandwidth is used up. By making a donation, every Internet user can help to fund the bandwidth needed to maintain and extend access to the unblocked websites.
New: RSF is offering a Google Chrome and Firefox browser extension called “Censorship detector” that facilitates access to websites within the countries where they are censored.
Websites unblocked by RSF
Focus on Censorship
- Bahrain
- Belarus
- Burundi
- China
- Djibouti
- Egypt
- Iran
- Pakistan
- Philippines
- Saudi Arabia
- Turkmenistan
- United Arab Emirates
- Vietnam
Bahrain
Bahrain’s Information Affairs Agency has had the power to censor websites since 2002. Posting content that criticizes Islam or the king, or incites violence or the overthrow of the government, is punishable by up to five years in prison. The government’s control of the Internet is facilitated by its majority shareholding in the kingdom’s leading Internet Service Provider, Batelco, which monitors and filters traffic. Officials cite the need to protect the public from pornography but many sites are targeted for their political content. Since the pro-democracy demonstrations of February 2011, news sites such as Bahrain Mirror and the daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi have been banned for posting articles critical of the government. Online censorship includes going after dissidents. Human rights defender Nabeel Rajab, blogger Ghada Jamsheer and Maryam Al-Khawaja, co-president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, were all arrested in connection with online posts at the end of 2014.
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